Reviews and News:
William Deresiewicz reviews John D’Agata’s anthologies of the essay and finds them wanting: “John D’Agata has accomplished an impressive feat. In three thick volumes, over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies—of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim (D’Agata is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the most prestigious name in creative writing)—because effrontery, as everybody knows, will get you very far in American culture, and persistence in perverse opinion, further still. D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of critical esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in ‘unknowing’: in uncertainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion.” Humbug.
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Russell Crandall reviews Mario Vargas Llosa’s Cinco Esquinas: “What Joseph Conrad achieved in Nostromo (1904) in describing the ways of Latin American parts of the not-yet-named Third World, Vargas Llosa matches in describing 1990s Peru under the strongman (but democratically elected) President Alberto Fujimori and his Rasputin-like palace adviser Vladimiro Montesinos.”
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Matthew J. Franck’s daily plan to read all of Shakespeare’s works in a year.
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“It’s an auctioneer’s jackpot dream. A man walks in off the street, opens a portfolio of drawings, and there, mixed in with the jumble of routine low-value items, is a long-lost work by Leonardo da Vinci. And that, more or less, is what happened to Thaddée Prate, director of old master pictures at the Tajan auction house here, which is to announce on Monday the discovery of a drawing that a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art says is by Leonardo.”
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The rise of authoritarianism “is the central theme in a timely new collection of essays, Authoritarianism Goes Global. As a series of essays it lacks the coherent thrust of William Dobson’s fine The Dictator’s Learning Curve, about how autocrats no longer rely on naked repression, but the case is forcefully argued and some of the pieces are very good. The finest is by Alexander Cooley. It explores how authoritarian regimes undermine democratic norms by copying the language and institutions used in the West. Fear of Western-engineered ‘colour revolutions’, similar to those that broke out in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in 2003–5, haunts all the regimes concerned, while a second Arab Spring is the cauchemar of Gulf rulers.”
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Essay of the Day:
Instead of an essay today, here is an interesting discussion of Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn, Sr.’s book Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University between Bradley C.S. Watson, Peter Wood, and the two authors:
“Josh Dunn is correct to point out the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ among those on the right. But it doesn’t follow from this that the term ‘right-wing’ is a good or necessary descriptor for the various shades of conservatism that he and his co-author, Jon Shields, find in the academy. If, as Josh says, they use “right-wing” merely as a ‘synonym for conservatism,’ why not stick with conservatism—and include an appropriate footnote explaining those shades? Alternatively, why not stick with ‘those on the right’ versus ‘those on the left,’ and thus jettison the pejorative connotations of ‘right-wing’? I’ll reiterate what I said in my initial review by agreeing with Peter Wood. Like him, I don’t encounter any colleagues who refer to themselves as ‘right-wingers,’ except ironically. As Peter says, this language flows easily from the lips of the progressive commentariat, not to mention from progressive professors. I maintain that it’s not very helpful language—other than helping to make the book eminently quotable by such people.
“As to the authors’ methodology, no reiteration of their snowball sampling technique is required. The point I made in my review is not that they are bad social scientists, or that they didn’t work carefully and hard to do what they’ve done. Rather, it’s that any ‘thick description’ inevitably makes it difficult to reach generalizable conclusions. In the instant case, the problems flow from the authors’ small sample (particularly in relation to the overall size of the American academy), conjoined with the fact that their subjects were, necessarily, already enjoying academic success—after all, they had real academic jobs. What of the conservatives who don’t? Perhaps a snowball sample could more profitably uncover this “difficult to locate” population. And of course no snowball sample would be required if they were trying to identify progressive interviewees amongst the more than a million college instructors in the United States—ipso facto evidence of a much bigger problem than Shields and Dunn seem to suggest.
“The scope of the problem is shown in other ways too. If the point of Passing on the Right is to encourage, or at least not ‘unnecessarily dissuade’ conservatives and libertarians from pursuing academic careers, it’s hard to see how it can do this by telling them the view from the top is fine—but only after they’ve scaled Mount Everest in winter. And this is especially so if no effort is made to remind them that so many fellow-travelers—probably a majority—have fallen to their deaths along the way. While I’m not saying the noble effort should be avoided, I do think Passing on the Right calls more for complacency than heroism. And the latter, or more particularly the moral virtue that makes it possible, is what’s most needed in the academy.”
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Image of the Day: Green meteorite
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Poem: J. Allyn Rosser, “Assisted Living”
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